Donald Trump has added $3 billion to his wealth since returning to the White House. How?

What does Trump earn as president? 
He gets a $400,000 annual government salary, which he says he donates to worthy causes. But even if Trump kept the entire paycheck, it would be dwarfed by the billions of dollars flowing to him and his family via the Trump Organization, which operates Trump-­branded properties, golf clubs, and other ventures; the Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs his Truth Social social media platform; and various cryptocurrency ventures. Many of Trump’s businesses struggled after he left the White House in 2021, according to internal Trump Organization documents seen by The New York Times. But since returning to the Oval Office, his wealth has skyrocketed, climbing to a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion just before the 2024 election, according to Forbes. Critics accuse Trump of turning the presidency into a cash cow and of erasing the line between the business of the nation and his own private businesses. “When it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime Washington watchdog. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls such accusations of profiteering “absurd” and insists “the president is abiding by all conflict-of-­interest laws.” 

Is he abiding by those laws?
It’s murky, but what is clear is that Trump has departed from previous ethical norms. To avoid the appearance of self-­dealing, Jimmy Carter famously turned over his Georgia peanut farm to a blind trust before entering the White House. In contrast, Trump in his first term entrusted control of his assets to sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and vowed that “no new deals” would be made by his real estate business while he was in office. He found other ways to make money. Just before his 2017 inauguration, the cost of membership at his Mar-a-Lago resort doubled to $200,000. (It’s now $1 million.) Foreign delegations, corporate lobbyists, and others seeking to curry favor with Trump invested in and booked stays at his properties; in the first three months of 2018, revenue from room rentals at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan climbed 13% thanks to bookings by the entourage of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince. Officials from foreign governments such as China, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates collectively spent more than $750,000 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., over his first term. (He sold the property after leaving office.) “Isn’t it rude to come to [Trump’s] city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” one Asian diplomat told The Washington Post. 

Were those payments legal? 
They led to lawsuits from the attorneys general of Maryland and Washington, D.C., and from an independent watchdog, who accused him of violating a constitutional prohibition on the president receiving gifts from foreign entities. But the cases were deemed moot by the Supreme Court in 2021 because he was no longer president. While campaigning for office in 2024, Trump launched a new company that would make it easier to receive such gifts: crypto trading platform World Liberty Financial. Co-­founded with his sons and the family of Steve Witkoff—a real estate developer and now Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East—the company pays the Trumps up to 75% of the revenue from the sale of certain coins. The family’s stake in the firm is now thought to be worth $5 billion. 

Did business pick up after the election?
Just before Inauguration Day, the Trump family launched two crypto memecoins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA. The value of both spiked and then crashed, but it’s estimated that the Trumps made $100 million in $TRUMP trading fees in less than two weeks. In May, Trump—who once called crypto “a scam”—invited the top 220 $TRUMP investors to a gala dinner at his golf club in Virginia. The top buyer, with nearly $20 million of $TRUMP, was Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who late last year spent $75 million on World Liberty Financial coins. In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped fraud charges against Sun. Meanwhile, Amazon is spending an unprecedented $40 million to license a documentary on Melania Trump; the first lady is expected to get at least $28 million of the fee. Other family members are also capitalizing on their proximity to power. 

How are they benefiting? 
Donald Jr. has co-founded the Executive Branch, a $500,000-a-year private members club in Washington, D.C., where business moguls can mingle with MAGA bigwigs and Cabinet members. Its opening event was attended by crypto investors, tech CEOs, and at least half a dozen senior members of the Trump administration. Eric oversees the Trump Organization, and weeks before his father’s spring tour of the Middle East, he raced across the region to secure property deals, including a $5.5 billion Trump resort in Qatar, funded by firms connected to the Qatari and Saudi royal families. Trump seemingly acknowledged the importance of Eric to the family firm last month when he was caught on a hot mic at the Gaza ceasefire summit in Egypt telling Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, “I’ll have Eric call you.” 

What do investors get in return?
A direct return is not always obvious, but U.S. policy has bent in ways that benefit Trump business partners. Trump has ordered the Justice Department to pull back on investigations involving crypto, which is often used to hide criminal activity. Last week, Trump pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering at his crypto exchange Binance. Zhao’s firm has close ties with World Liberty Financial. And in September, Trump signed an executive order promising to defend Qatar—which gifted him a $400 million Boeing 747-8 this spring—from any attack, despite the nation’s history of supporting Hamas and other extremist groups. The Trumps, though, are unfazed by corruption accusations. “They’re going to hit you no matter what,” said Don Jr., “so we’re just going to play the game.”

The Trumps and the Witkoffs 
It all began with a ham-and-cheese sandwich: In 1986, young lawyer Steve Witkoff offered to pick up Trump’s tab at a Manhattan deli. The two became firm friends, and Witkoff, 68, has since been dispatched by Trump to make peace with his defeated Republican rivals in the 2024 primaries and to secure ceasefires in Gaza and Ukraine. Two of Witkoff’s sons, Alex and Zach, are World Liberty Financial co-founders and have pitched real estate and crypto deals to Middle East governments. In May, Witkoff helped secure a deal that would let the UAE buy the most advanced artificial intelligence chips from the U.S., even though some Trump administration officials worried that the Emirates might share those chips with its ally China. Around the same time, a UAE-backed firm invested $2 billion in a stablecoin sold by World Liberty Financial. Asked whether Witkoff had a conflict of interest, the White House said he “takes seriously his compliance with the government ethics rules.”

“Something bad was bound to happen,” said Nancy Armour in USA Today. Ever since gamblers paid eight players on the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series, professional sports leagues have vehemently opposed any involvement of players and leagues in betting on games. But in 2018, the Supreme Court made it legal for states to license sports-betting companies. As billions of dollars poured in, professional leagues entered into partnerships with the gambling companies, thinking they could take the profits and leave the “seedy underbelly.” But two federal indictments unveiled last week rocked the sports world, placing the NBA at “the center of a massive betting scandal.” One case accuses Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former player Damon Jones of allegedly leaking confidential injury information to gamblers so they could bet on the opposing team. A second case accuses Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups of enticing people into rigged poker games backed by the Mafia. 

This scandal “is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. Multiple pro and college basketball and baseball players have been accused over the past year of altering their performances because of gambling schemes. Sports betting is “inherently corrupting,” and fans must now wonder whenever a player claims an injury or has a lousy game if it’s “because a shady associate” bet against his team. Sports gambling also hurts “the millions of Americans who gamble past the point of prudence,” said David French in The New York Times. One recent Maryland study found that 20% of sports gamblers engage in “disordered gambling,” with negative impact on their lives. Another 31% are on the edge of losing control. Leagues and society have embraced sports gambling at the cost of widespread “addiction, bankruptcy, and despair.” 

Gambling is even ruining sports itself, said Joon Lee, also in The New York Times. Sports “was one of the few places where Americans could still gather around something bigger than ourselves,” while watching competitions in which “effort, honesty, and hope could still decide the outcome.” But now the games seem more like “background noise” as fans obsessively track odds, refresh apps, and bet on whether the next pitch is a strike or next foul shot is made. Pure fandom is fading away as “gambling touches everything,” leaving leagues “hostage to the forces they unleashed.” We’re all poorer for it, whether we gamble or not.

Malala Yousafzai made a remarkable recovery after being shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban in 2012, said Sirin Kale in The Guardian (U.K.). The girls’ education activist—who was 15 when a terrorist tried to kill her—resettled in England, won the Nobel Peace Prize at age 17, and earned a place at Oxford University. It was there that things started to unravel, as she tried to balance her studies with traveling for her nonprofit, the Malala Fund, and the paid speaking gigs that supported her parents and two brothers, as well as her extended family in Pakistan. 

Yousafzai’s grades suffered and she had to seek help from specialist tutors. The education champion, now 28, says she “felt like an impostor. I felt ashamed.” Then, one night in Oxford, she smoked marijuana from a bong for the first time. Memories she’d long repressed of the Taliban attack—the gun, the blood, the crowds—started to play on a loop in her mind. “I felt numb. I’m the girl who was shot. I’m supposed to be brave.” She saw a therapist and began to understand the weight of the trauma, stress, and responsibility she was bearing. 

“I survived an attack, and I laughed it off. I thought nothing could scare me. And then I was scared of small things and that broke me. But in this journey, I realized what it means to be actually brave. When you can not only fight the real threats out there, but fight within.”